In my previous landscapes, I’ve always added background hills and mountains as separate entities which were distinct from the foreground landscape. I want to experiment with making a more seamless transition where the landscape flows continuously from the foreground through the background.
Using a single 8k texture for this results in very little detail in the foreground when the camera is positioned close to the surface. It works fine for aerial shots looking down from a distance, but up-close there isn’t enough detail in the map.
Previously, I have combined noise textures with the heightmaps to introduce detail where it is not available from the heightmap alone, or covered the landscape with vegetation which hides most of the terrain so it isn’t visible.
So for this project I expanded on the technique of creating the terrain in Blender, exporting it to Gaea simply to perform an erosion and calculate data maps (flow, curvature, etc), as I had done here. This time I created 3 maps, the midground, a foreground scaled down by half, and a background scaled up by 3. When superimposed, these maps are seamless, and the terrain appears uninterrupted as it transitions from one to the next in the camera view.
Unfortunately, the erosion and export process resulted in heightmaps which don’t fit together nearly as well as the original maps. The features are still in the same locations, but the vertical scale of each map was altered in what appears to be a non-linear fashion. I massaged them the best I could in the shader editor, but I’ll need to come up with a better solution to post-process the heightmaps to achieve better uniformity. Perhaps the maps exported from Blender need to be adjusted before sending them to Gaea as well.
Does anyone have experience with this workflow, and have some insights to share?
Still have lots to do for this image. This is a raw render, no compositing or post work of any kind. I’ve done basic texturing, but due to the lighting I chose for this render, you can hardly tell. I haven’t decided if I’m going to include vegetation, or keep it mud and rocks.
Please let me know what you think of this preliminary render. If you have comments, critiques, or suggestions, I’m all ears!